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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I despise arguments like yours, which logically lead to the claim that only the most important problem in the world should be worried about until it is solved, and then the new most important problem, etc. Not only is it ridiculous on its own, it also requires the arguer to break the very rule he or she is proposing, by spending time worrying about what other people are worrying about, instead of whatever the most important problem in the world is.

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I can't remember who said this, but my response to your comment can be best articulated with this quote "all philosophical arguments root from grammatical inconsistencies".

So, I apologize if I made you feel that way. That was not my intent. The only other time I remember such an outcry here at HN was when Steve Jobs passed. A big and depressing event, indeed. I just don't understand why we complain so sparsely about "bigger" problems as we are doing about these privacy issues. There have been some discussions about education policies, but they come and go. Privacy issues have been lurking around ever since social media emerged, and as I said, I am worried that this event makes it go overboard.

If you genuinely do not understand why humans almost universally do this, I can offer some ideas. One is temporal proximity. The NSA leaks are very recent in time, while other arguably more important problems have been around forever. There's also physical proximity (people aren't dying of hunger much in the Western world), likelihood of affecting change (people may think that political action right now can help with the NSA issues, but probably gave up on protesting foreign policy or the drug war years ago), topicality (Jobs' death may not be more important than world hunger, but it's proportionally more directly relevant to this community), etc.

More important problems such as that Google, a publically-traded for-profit company having the very data that NSA seeks to obtain, and yet very few so much as bat an eye at that, but instead say that it's OK for Google and their advertisers and 3rd parties to have access to the data and for them to change the privacy policy at will, as long as the gub'mint doesn't have that data.

You are right, of course: The leaks are more recent in time than the people pointing that out about Google/Facebook/etc., so I'm not that surprised at the difference in reaction.

Solving the privacy issues is easily solvable. It just requires the people in power to change policy, perhaps sit down and write a law or two. Simply, it is easily do-able, right now. We can get this done.

Solving the huge things like global warming, cancer, poverty, starvation, cancer, etc, are a little bit more involved, and will probably take a while, no matter what the motivation.

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